Bollockoff wrote:

I'm sure having Page die in any way will be game over. That doesn't work for me. She should be a potential distraction like your packmates in Tokyo Jungle. You can find new orphaned children throughout the ruins as you explore and have them tag along like a string of pied piper meat treats for anything that wants to kill you.

Centipede Champ Ed.

Brooks wrote:

Absence of glowing things for the environment puzzles in HL2, so I mean it's entirely do-able. Seems like another grip of Teh Fears hitting a major studio, makes me sad enough to post on the Internet about it.

No... HL2 is chock full of contrivances. It's still a mack game, but... It has a hit point system ffs!

adored wrote:

Surely it'd work with a character just mentioning it when you look at it on screen? That's pretty much what happens anyway, just without the ready-brek effect. Edit: Replying to Dynammite's post on last page.

That's a new "trope", I'm sure...

Brooks wrote:

Not that Centipede Okay maybe that Centipede

Centipede is a badass game...

Blame Halo, which at least made sense of the system in part.

I do now want a game where you can excrete bullets out of your pores though

Maybe you can switch the glowing ladder effect off.

Brooks wrote:

Dyno I agree it's not without its own series of fudges but on the specific of overt guidance systems for managing object-push tasks, the Valve number did at least manage to dodge literally making things have to signpost themselves so blatantly and thus introduce a modicum of friction.

Umm... I understood this bit...

You see, HL2 is one of my favourite games for the way it magpied' a whole wodge of cinematic conventions, and turned those into utile videogame mechanisms (use of lighting, most especially).

Brooks wrote:

It's sort of tolerable, narratively (though it remains a cop-out on the raw challenge front), when yeah you're playing spaceman in spacehat like Halo and you expect Hi Tech to be a major aesthetic element front and centre but that can't fly everywhere without consequence to the integrity of the whole. Whether one picks that up or not is endlessly example and counter-examplable because omg so many humans and opinions but I only care about mine

This baffled the shit out of me (I'm presently on my second can of super soup though... so that figures.)... But I suppose the tools available to the gamer should match the aesthetic...

That said, once you get into that mode of thought, you'll start yo encounter a ridiculous number of unanswerable questions that cut in a number of different directions...

Like, try to recall just about every single sports game abstraction you can think of...

They all leak like an anxious child...

Not only.

I can and do think about what's up with other formats. For me a sportgame isn't going to be tonally compromised by cursors etc. so badly. Titles like this disasterthing are going for mood that denies triviality and privileges immersion, for the fiction of risk, reward, consequence and non-actionfigurery characters to survive. FIFA just isn't. I could absolutely deal with markers on sports footage, actually one of the neatest innovations for US footy coverage was when they started projecting a 1st down line on the pitch.

If that means abandoning/avoiding scenarios which current mechanical and representational tropes can't hang with, or retuning to accommodate same, so be it - that's called good writing. Better competence than fudge.

If they deem this ladder business to be the most suitable means of guiding the player then presumably in practice the level of immersion they seek is not compromised to the point of brokenage.  I'll give them the BOTD until I get hands on it.  If the desire to contextualize every signpost or guiding hand results in a frustrating guessing game I'll take glowy ladders please.  I'll buy into whatever they throw at me if the groundwork is there, Spielbergian kinda thing.

Impact on capacity to surprise is a whole other category, and quite important too.

Not necessarily had counter-immersive in mind, but if it's deemed that the game is best played apace then facilitating rapid point A to B movement might be paramount.  Struggling to recall specific examples but the thrill of total immersion when it's all happening can be deadened by dragging out same thrilling section through vague placement or indication of the next point of progression.  Sort of takes the magic out a scene when you're dicking about trying to find a barn door to shut after the horse has been out for so long it's wandered back to see where you got to.  I dunno, I mean maybe they made a clumsy design choice and that will bear (lol) out but I'll suspect good reasons for doing so til then.

In other words I agree with the second bit using more words less effectively.

If it's an issue of pacing then I'd rather they dropped the 'puzzle' completely and had the ladder in place rather than scream at me HERE IS A LADDER AND YOU CAN INTERACT WITH IT BECAUSE IT HAS THIS SPECIAL ORANGE GLOW.

It's not really a puzzle though is it? I don't think it's even pretending to be. It's just another objective.

Fwiw:

'Snay mine, just grabbed that offa GIS. Content's accurate though - chewy little yellow oblongs. Ignore the cheese-string style stripping serving suggestion, they're too wee for that.

So this has got MP then...